How to Landscape Your Front Lawn
Add some mud, lawn seed and water - and a lot of hope.
I hate, hate, hate gardening.
I’ll push a mower around and get out the Weed Wacker so the city doesn’t send a bill, but that’s pretty much where it ends.
BW had me gardening today.
I had a very good excuse why I couldn’t do any lawn care or landscaping until now: I was waiting for the plumber service to get rid of the big piles of dirt on our front lawn:
The child loved loved loved the dirt pile.
There were actual tears today for the dirt pile when she realized it was gone.
The plumbers finally came and re-landscaped the front lawn so there’s no big piles of dirt on the front lawn and they smoothed things over and threw some grass seed down and booked it out of here. I have my doubts that the grass seed will take, but now I have become that crazy old man know as the lawn guy who’s out standing and watering his dirt pile and watching for any signs of life from the 3 seeds that remain on the dirt after the neighborhood birds have eaten the rest.
I had outsourced the work because there’s not one but two big honking piles of dirt and I don’t own a backhoe so when we signed up to have our sewer replaced and we signed up for the landscaper service to flatten out the dirt pile and seed.
This is where it gets kind of funny, well - not funny - more ridiculous. As I write this there’s a 2 foot pipe sticking up above the lawn that I assumed they would cut down when they landscaped so that the vent is flush with the ground.
I assumed wrong.
That’s not the landscaper’s job.
They’re actually going to send another guy out to cut off 2 feet of plastic pipe so it’s flush with the ground. Whatever, I guess but it seems like a waste of effort. They had people here I assumed they would take care of it while they were there.
So, our front lawn is now flat, but muddy and no signs of grass yet.
If that wasn’t enough for me for one day today I also installed some new landscape bricks (actually plastic bricks) as our previous - also plastic - bricks were dug up by the plumbers and they were old and needed to be replaced anyway.
These were actually pretty easy to install. BW found them on the internet and if you only have one eye like I do they look like bricks from far away which is about as close as anybody other than the Amazon delivery guy gets anyway.
Before:
After:
As one can imagine, this pretty much took all afternoon, but I was not done yet.
I had to take the child to the dentist.
Want to know what’s worse than going to your dentist. Taking your child that’s afraid of even the tiniest attention paid to her teeth. These dentists for kids are good and know all the tricks with the mirror and the brushes but it’s still a struggle. A struggle I wasn’t looking forward to one bit.
As I am standing in line waiting to pick up the child at the school - my phone rings and it’s the dentist. All the dental techs are down with the stomach bug so they have to reschedule.
Great. We don’t have to go, right?
The problem was I spent all week working the child up that we’re going and she better get her mind wrapped around this idea and if all goes well there might be a happy meal in her future.
Change! I want to go to the dentist!
Actual tears about not being able to go to the dentist. Go figure.
But, we got over it and as it’s the last sunny day for the next seven or so here we took the opportunity to go to the park on the swings:
and if getting to go to the park instead of the dentist wasn't enough fun, we also found a mother bird sitting on her eggs in a nest:
Not only did we get to go to the park we got to see a bird on a nest taking care of her soon-to-be young.
The child named the bird “warmy”, because the mother bird was keeping the eggs warm.
Back home we go and we’re done, yes?
Oh. No.
While were gone at the park, BW moved the sprinkler from my lawn seeds and I’m pretty sure this is one of the original sins - my grass seeds!
The moved sprinkler now sprayed in part over the driveway.
Want to know who loved, loved the sprinkler? I bet you can guess.
She squealed and squeaked with joy as she scootered under the sprinkler on repeat. It wasn’t sprinkler running weather here and we warned her, but she doesn’t care.
She was an ice cube when she finally came in and we pointed her towards a warm shower and I think if I had my druthers I could have put her to bed right then. It was early, but she had the post-shower tired feeling and I thought she might just go to bed early.
I can dream.
I tossed some chicken on the grill and I look up and she’s in the knee-high grass in the backyard with the dog and the dog has found my gardening glove and is trying to eat it. I have to leave my grill to chase a dog around the yard for some half-eaten work glove.
This is my life.
I won’t bore you with the rest of the routine other than to tell you it took me at least four times to get her to go to bed tonight.
“No, you can’t sleep in the hallway. You have a bed”, I tell her.
Finally. Child is asleep, lawn has been cared for as much as it’s getting and we witnessed some nature at the park instead of going to go to the dentist.
It’s 9:11 pm as I write this and I think she’s finally out.
Tomorrow, she has a doctor’s appointment at 8am, so I am sure it will be an easy morning getting her out the door in time tomorrow morning.
Right?
Keep watering,
TH and Co.